About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Reaching Out To The 'New Majority': The Green's Metiria Turei is hoping that by inviting idealistic New Zealanders to join her party in advancing progressive causes they will, through the osmosis of engagement, be ready to assist the Greens in next year's election. Labour, by contrast, has circled the wagons against everyone except those belonging to what one Shearer advisor calls "The Real Labour Party".

THE REAL FIGHT is now on the Left. John Key’s government has
begun descending the long slope that leads to electoral destruction – which only
the most extraordinary events (think 9/11) can interrupt. Once political gravity
has a government in its grip, the location of the really significant political
battles shifts immediately to the territory of its opponents. This is what we
see happening right now in the respective strategies of Labour and the Greens.

So far, the Greens are winning.

On Sunday, the Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei,
delivered her “State of the Planet” speech to picnickers gathered in the Tahaki
Reserve on the slopes of Auckland’s Maungawhau/Mt Eden. At roughly the same
time, 600 kilometres to the South, Labour’s David Shearer was addressing his
party’s Summer School in Wainuiomata.

The overwhelming focus of Ms Turei’s speech was what she
called “the new majority” and how the Green Party proposes to harness its
decisive electoral power. This new initiative, “I’m in – for the future”, seeks
to replicate in a New Zealand context the extraordinarily successful
‘get-out-the-vote’ initiatives perfected by Barack Obama’s campaign
organisations in both 2008 and 2012.

One need not be a member of the Greens to participate in
this new organising initiative. Road-tested in the campaign to secure a
Citizens Initiated Referendum on the partial sale of the state’s energy
generators, the goal of “I’m in – for the future” is to enlist activists around
specific progressive issues and causes (like affordable housing) trusting that the Green
Party message will be absorbed through the osmosis of engagement. Over three
thousand “Asset Savers” – only 60 percent of whom were Green Party members when
they signed on – have already been identified in this fashion.

The Greens hope to call on this newly-recruited activist
base in 2014. By building up their numbers “on-the-ground”, the gap between the
Greens’ nominal support (as measured by the pollsters) and the support actually
received in the polling booths should be narrowed significantly. Even if “I’m in
– for the future” only delivers a 1-2 percent boost in the Greens’ Party Vote, its
overall impact on the outcome of the 2014 General Election could prove
decisive.

Labour’s ability to “get-out-the-vote” – once the subject of
political legend – is now a pallid shadow of its former prodigious grunt. With
a steadily declining share of the Party Vote, Labour, too, must find a way of
plugging into the energy of the New Majority. (Defined by Ms Turei as “the new
consciousness of environmental issues, human rights, fairness and the need for
good change.”)

Unfortunately for the people Labour purports to represent,
the current disposition of political forces within the Labour Party makes this
impossible. Ignoring the radically democratic message from delegates attending
last year’s annual conference, David Shearer has circled the wagons against not
only his own activist rank-and-file, but also the expectations of the broader
labour movement.

The Labour Leader’s inner circle of advisors is
distinguished neither by intellectual creativity nor operational dynamism. Far
from reaching-out to activists and supporters outside the party’s structures,
most of the Shearer Camp’s energies appear to be devoted to finding new ways of
insulting and excluding them from policy-making. Like the unlamented Stalinists
of the old Socialist Unity Party, Mr Shearer’s backers would rather keep control of the losing side – than lose control of the winning
side.

State Of The Nation: David Shearer's speech to Labour's Summer School was a leaden rehearsal of policy announcements already months old.

Mr Shearer’s speech to the Labour Party Summer School at
Wainuiomata show-cased every one of these weaknesses. A leaden rehearsal of
policy announcements already months old, written in exactly the same
unconvincing and uninspiring style as every other speech he has delivered since
becoming leader (at the very least you’d think Mr Shearer might have found a
better speech-writer!) the address possessed only one notable line:

“A
tide for change is building.”

These words, at least, ring true. The tragedy, however, is
that Labour’s response to this tide's surge and pull is a cautious
collection of technocratic adjustments to the status quo. A Capital Gains Tax.
Raising the age of eligibility for NZ Super. Employer subsidies and youth training
schemes. Fussing about with the Reserve Bank Act. Even Labour’s policy
centrepiece – the KiwiBuild scheme – is little more than a gigantic PPP scheme
targeted at the restive children of the middle class. It took the Greens to
come up with a housing policy specifically designed for Kiwis without homes.

Given their head, the Labour Party’s rank-and-file would
give the Greens a serious run for their money in the progressive policy stakes.
Unfortunately, the only interest Mr Shearer has in his rank-and-file’s head is
in it being presented to him on a platter. And if the cautious coterie of
centrists advising Mr Shearer have little time for their own members, they have
none at all for progressives outside the party.

The Greens, by reaching-out, are reaching-up.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 29 January 2013.

Friday, 25 January 2013

"We, The People": Unburdened by the compromising calculations of re-election, President Barack Obama, in his second inaugural address, challenged his fellow American's to fully realise the clear democratic purpose of those first three words of the United States' Constitution.

“WHY DON’T you guys do something?” Those were the words that
sparked the Gay Liberation Movement.

It was the summer of 1969 and in New York City’s Greenwich
Village there was, to quote Bob Dylan, “music in the cafés at night and
revolution in the air”. When the New York Police Department raided the
mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, a favourite haunt of the Village’s gay community, on
Saturday 28 June, trouble was not expected – and yet, trouble came.

A young lesbian woman, beaten and manhandled by the NYPD’s
finest, challenged the swelling crowd of gay street kids and transvestites to
“do something” and all their pent-up frustration and rage at the petty
humiliations routinely inflicted by the authorities spontaneously erupted into
a series of riotous protests that were not finally brought under control until
nearly 72 hours later.

It is a measure of the sea-change in American politics that,
on Tuesday morning, the re-elected President of the United States, Barack
Hussein Obama, included the Stonewall Riots among the seminal moments in the
history of the struggle for gender, racial and sexual equality in America.

To the nearly one million people gathered in the Washington
Mall to witness the second inauguration of America’s first black president, Mr
Obama declared:

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of
truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still;
just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall;
just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints
along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to
hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the
freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Many gay Americans must have wondered if their ears deceived
them. Could their President really be saying that the Stonewall riots belonged
alongside the world’s first women’s convention, held in the little upstate New
York town of Seneca Falls on 19-20 July 1848? The gathering which gave the
world a ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ signalling the birth of Feminism and the
long struggle for women’s rights? Yes he was. Nor were the billy-clubs that
battered the patrons of the Stonewall Inn to be in any way distinguished from
the billy-clubs that battered Dr Martin Luther King and the hundreds of black
civil-rights marchers he led into Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965. They were
all instruments of oppression: instruments to be overcome.

Could the man standing on the Capitol steps really have said
such things? Yes he could. And he said more – much more:

“It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those
pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers,
and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not
complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under
the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to
one another must be equal as well.”

"Why Don't You Guys Do Something?" The gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn confront the New York City Police. Greenwich Village, NY, NY. Saturday, 28 June 1969.

In the same week that the head of the Sensible Sentencing
Trust, Garth McVicar, asserted that Gay Marriage would lead to an increase in
New Zealand’s crime-rate, President Obama’s words are not only timely, but
inspirational.

They give notice to all those who, like Mr McVicar, regard
the great struggles for human equality and freedom not as markers of humanity’s
progress towards the unconditional love Christ commanded, but as harbingers of
Western Society’s imminent collapse, that the crippling social conservatism of
the past thirty years is at an end.

The “Rainbow Coalition” that Mr Obama has woven out of
Blacks, Hispanics, Working Women, Trade Unionists, Gays and Youth: those
Americans whom the Republican Right has worked so hard to marginalise and
exclude; now have a President who is not only ready but eager to imbue those
first three words of the United States’ Constitution – “We, the People” – with
all the democratic purpose America’s Founding Fathers intended.

Radio New Zealand–National’s Morning Report characterised President Obama’s second inaugural
address as a call for unity in a bitterly divided America. It is far from being
that. In his own way, President Obama is also asking: “Why don’t you guys do
something?”

The American Revolution, begun in “a spare Philadelphia
hall”, continues.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 January 2013.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

Reading The Signs: An early leadership vote in Labour's new Electoral College poses as many political risks for David Shearer as it does for David Cunliffe. It would be cruelly ironic if the two leading contenders were to beat themselves to death for the benefit of a third - Grant Robertson.

AS FEBRUARY’S scheduled leadership ballot looms, Labour
Leader, David Shearer, and his rival, David Cunliffe, have some tough strategic
decisions to make.

Since last November’s Annual Conference and its controversial
aftermath many Labour members have demanded that the February vote be
transferred from Caucus to the party’s newly-established Electoral College.
Only in this way, they argue, can the sins of David Shearer and his minions be
washed away. The unspoken assumption behind these dissidents’ demands is that
the Electoral College will return not Mr Shearer but Mr Cunliffe as Labour’s
leader.

Now we learn from the pseudonymous “Eddie”, writing at “The
Standard” – New Zealand’s third-largest and Labour-leaning blogsite – that Mr
Shearer may be preparing to call Mr Cunliffe’s supporters’ bluff by giving them
the Electoral College vote they’ve been clamouring for.

Though indisputably a bold and potentially game-changing
move, Mr Shearer cannot be unaware of the many and serious strategic and
tactical risks associated with this course of action.

The most obvious risk is that once an Electoral College vote
is arranged the likelihood of the contest being limited to just two candidates
is extremely remote. Once the process is set in motion, Mr Shearer’s supporters
have no way of preventing Grant Robertson or Andrew Little from adding their
names to the ballot paper. Should that happen the political calculations
immediately become much more complex.

Labour’s new Electoral College is required to tally the
votes cast by the Parliamentary Caucus, Ordinary Members and Trade Union Affiliates and
then re-calculate the results so that the votes of the Caucus account for 40 percent
of the total, Ordinary Members 40 percent, and Affiliates 20 percent. Whether
the contest will be decided on the basis of a simple plurality of the votes
cast, or according to some form of preferential voting system, is not yet
clear.

If it’s the former, then the margin separating Mr Shearer
and Mr Cunliffe is likely to be very narrow. But if some form of preferential
system is employed, then neither Mr Shearer nor Mr Cunliffe is assured of
victory. Supporters of the principal contenders are most unlikely to put their
candidate’s rival anywhere but last on their list of preferences. Mr Shearer
and Mr Cunliffe could thus face early elimination, leaving the field to Mr
Robertson and Mr Little. The smart money in that fight would be on Mr
Robertson.

Demanding the leadership question be decided by the
Electoral College in February 2013 is, therefore, the worst possible move Mr
Cunliffe’s supporters could make. Because even if he emerged victorious from
the calculations of the Electoral College, Mr Cunliffe’s problems would be far
from over.

His greatest challenge would lie in persuading those
colleagues who have repeatedly demonstrated a quite irrational animosity
towards the New Lynn MP’s leadership ambitions to swing in behind the Electoral
College’s choice. If their past actions are any guide, the “Anybody But
Cunliffe” faction would immediately set about undermining Mr Cunliffe’s
position. Secret caucus debates would be repeated verbatim to favoured members
of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and senior Labour MPs would not shrink from
vicious public criticism of their leader’s favoured policies.

Such a public display of political disunity would very
quickly reduce Labour to a laughing-stock. Subjected to unrelenting media
criticism and with its poll numbers collapsing the Cunliffe-led Opposition
would be judged to have very little to offer the electorate.

Labour’s leadership, secured too early, is, therefore, much
more likely to destroy, rather than enhance, Mr Cunliffe’s chances of becoming
Prime Minister. The gift they are most anxious to bestow is, paradoxically, the
gift Mr Cunliffe’s followers should, for the time being at least, withhold.

Mr Shearer, too, should think very carefully before
confirming “Eddie’s” rumour. It was, after all, the same pseudonymous writer
who kicked off all the discussion about Mr Shearer’s leadership deficiencies
immediately prior to last year’s Conference. That discussion, which suddenly
(and without justification) morphed into the media-driven accusation that Mr Cunliffe
was mounting a leadership challenge led, in turn, to his savage relegation to
the back-benches.

I have learned that at about the same time as “Eddie” was mounting his first assault against Mr Shearer, a representative of at least one of the trade union affiliates was sounding-out fellow unionists’ opinions of a Robertson candidacy. (It is important to note here that Mr Robertson emphatically denies any involvement in, or knowledge of, such soundings.)

Now “Eddie” is at it again. Were Mr Shearer to allow himself
to be goaded into an early vote in the Electoral College it is possible –
indeed it is quite likely – that both he and his most serious rival, Mr
Cunliffe, could find themselves manoeuvred out of contention.

It would be cruelly ironic if Mr Shearer and Mr
Cunliffe were to beat each other to death – for the benefit of Mr Robertson.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
22 January 2013.

Friday, 18 January 2013

Second-Class Non-Citizens: Australia's and New Zealand's Nineteenth Century immigration policies discriminated viciously against the Chinese, denying them the same political, economic and social rights as those enjoyed by their workmates and neighbours. In the Twenty-First Century, Kiwis seem to have replaced the Chinese as Australia's second-class non-citizens - to the ultimate advantage of New Zealand's employing class.

WE HAVE BECOME Australia’s coolies. Openly discriminated
against by state and federal authorities, New Zealanders and their children are
officially denied the same social and political rights as their Australian neighbours
and workmates. Nearly half-a-million Kiwis living in Australia are subjected to
taxation without representation – the same injustice against which Americans
rose in revolt in 1776. But so downtrodden and spiritless have we become that
every year more than 40,000 of us voluntarily submit to the same sort of racist
restrictions our government once imposed on Chinese immigrants.

Why are so many New Zealanders willing to endure such naked
discrimination? And why has their government been so abject, so supine, so
utterly useless at defending their rights?

The answers have much to do with the relative strength of
the New Zealand and Australian economies. Overwhelmingly, those boarding the
airliners for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth are economic migrants.
Australian wages are between thirty and fifty percent higher than those paid
for similar work in New Zealand – in some trades and professions twice as high.
For scores of thousands of under-employed and under-paid Kiwis, the lure of a
decent pay-packet is simply irresistible.

But economics is not the whole explanation for the huge
numbers emigrating to Australia. People do not abandon their homelands lightly.
To leave behind family, friends, colleagues and all the familiar and reassuring
geography of hearth and home one must be driven by factors of equal or even
greater emotional force. Fear, shame, resentment, greed and lust will drive
people across borders; but so, too, will the conviction that their homeland is
not only unable to offer them and their loved ones a life worth living, but also
that, really, it doesn’t care.

The creation of such a deadly malaise is never attributable
solely to the failings of those in authority. Our rulers remain in place
because we are content to leave them there. So, while governments may be the
immediate cause of the deep disillusionment that drives citizens from their
shores, there must also be a significant portion of the population which is, if
not gratified, then at least untroubled, by their departure.

In New Zealand’s case the culprits are not hard to find. One
has only to identify the class of citizens who have gained the most from the
economic and social settings driving so many of their compatriots across the
Tasman. Overwhelmingly, it is the employing class which is most untroubled –
even gratified – by the level of emigration.

Changes to employment law dating back to 1991 began the uncoupling
of New Zealand and Australian wage rates. The steady reduction of the social
wage paid to New Zealanders in the form of state-funded health, education and
housing services, which had begun ten years earlier with tax and spending cuts,
was thus rendered even more destructive. Other economic “reforms” led to the
wholesale deindustrialisation of New Zealand and a dramatic rise in structural
unemployment. The social and political consequences of these changes were
devastating, but without the safety-valve of emigration to Australia they would
also have been unsustainable.

Had Kiwis not been able to escape across the ditch,
unemployment levels in New Zealand would have generated an electoral backlash
of sufficient force to undo the neoliberal “reforms” from which employers had
gained so much economic, social and political power. But, with neither of the
major political parties willing to incur the wrath of the employing class (just
a little of whose power the Clark-led Labour-Alliance Government experienced in
the“Winter of Discontent” of 2000) the
changes required to convince New Zealanders that their government was, indeed,
committed to helping them make a better life for themselves were never introduced.

And so the exodus continues. To paraphrase King Richard II’s
contemptuous response to the defeated remnants of the Peasants Revolt of 1381:
“Coolies we are, and coolies we shall remain.”*

Until such time as we find the courage to build again a
nation worth loving – not leaving.

* When the vanquished rebels enquired of their King whether his promise to abolish villeinage (serfdom) still held, he replied: "Villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain."

This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 January 2013.

Tuesday, 15 January 2013

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people." : Saviour of the Union; Emanicpator of the Slaves; and tutelary deity of the American Republic: Abraham Lincoln.

LINCOLN WILL BE
HERE in eleven days. Already over twenty million Americans have seen Steven
Spielberg’s acclaimed movie. Critics report audiences rendered mute by a combination
of reverence and awe. Amidst all the tribulations occasioned by a faltering
economy and an increasingly rancorous society, Americans are taking time out to
be reminded that the American republic still stands as humanity’s most
remarkable experiment.

The rest of the world may laugh at America’s excess and
sneer at her lack of sophistication but the truth remains that the American
republic is an enterprise imbued with the highest moral purpose. Abraham
Lincoln understood this better than any other American President.

On his way to dedicate the Soldiers National Cemetery at
Gettysburg on 19 November 1863, Lincoln jotted down the 271 words that still
stand as not only his greatest speech but also the most succinct encapsulation
of the democratic impulse ever penned. Resonant with the rhetorical power of Shakespeare’s
plays and the King James Bible (large tracts of which Lincoln had committed to
memory) his Gettysburg Address effortlessly mixes the universal and particular
aspects of the struggle in which Americans were then engaged.

He begins by directly linking the conflict whose victims
they had gathered to commemorate with the ideals of the American Revolution of
1776.

“Four score and
seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or
any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

With characteristic
humility, Lincoln then turns to the men whose deaths have transformed that purely
speculative test into something approaching a blood pact: not only with those
who began the American enterprise, but also with those future generations of
Americans whose task it would be to preserve and extend it.

In what must
surely rank as one of the great perorations of American oratory, Lincoln then
concluded his address with these simple, but unforgettable, words:

“[W]e here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

It is easy to
forget that when Lincoln’s revolutionary formula was proclaimed over Gettysburg’s
blood-soaked battlefield, the United States of America stood alone as the only
nation among all the empires and kingdoms of the Earth that was even
rhetorically committed to the democratic ideal. The aristocratic oligarchy
which ruled Britain (and would have recognised the slave-owning Confederacy had the Battle of
Gettysburg gone the other way) had, under great political pressure, consented
to enfranchise its middle class in 1832. Full manhood suffrage would not be
achieved in the United Kingdom until 1918. In Democracy’s second home, France,
Napoleon’s nephew had proclaimed an authoritarian “Second Empire”.

Lincoln
understood that a Confederate victory would re-admit British and French imperialism
(Napoleon III was already eyeing Mexico) to the North American continent. How
long a savagely truncated USA, hemmed in by unfriendly competitors to the north
and south, could have preserved its democratic institutions is one of history’s
imponderables. One cannot, however, escape the conclusion that the sentiments
expressed by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address were those of a man who
understood that what was a stake in the American Civil War was nothing less
than the completion of the American Revolution or, if the Union’s arms failed,
its eventual repudiation.

Spielberg’s movie
takes as its subject the final months of Lincoln’s presidency, during which he
cajoles, inveigles and just plain threatens Congress into embracing a
constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. It’s a brutal but ultimately
inspiring depiction of politics as it is played by politicians who still believe
that great things are possible when men are encouraged to heed what Lincoln
called “the better angels” of their nature.

Perhaps this
explains the peculiarly serious mood in which Americans are viewing Spielberg’s
vivid recreation of Lincoln’s presidency. As if the cinematic amplification of
America’s revolutionary history and its revelation of the scale of the moral
objectives pursued by its protagonists has provided welcome confirmation that
human-beings, flawed though they be, may yet contrive to realise in
their earthly institutions the uncompromising injunctions of Heaven.

Those
revolutionary echoes were always going to be strengthened by Barack Obama’s
presidency, and his re-election has only given them an additional boost in
volume. Slavery and inequality were ever the serpent in America’s Eden. Lincoln
knew it and by the sheer force of his will and the prodigious quality of his
political talent he inspired his fellow Americans to ensure that neither would find
permanent refuge in the garden of the Great Republic.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 January 2013.

Monday, 14 January 2013

Key Policy: In 2011 Labour made opposition to a partial sale of the state's energy assets the centerpiece of its election campaign. National's long-signalled privatisation plans were thus thrown into sharp electoral focus. Significantly, the final result put Labour 20 percentage points behind National. With nearly 50 percent of the votes cast, Mr Key's Government not surprisingly claimed a strong mandate to proceed with its sales programme.

THE TARGET of 310,000 signatures has been reached – or so we
are told. The coalition of interest groups and political parties seeking a
Citizens’ Initiated Referendum (CIR) on the National Government’s plans to
partially privatise the state-owned energy generators has yet to submit its
petition to the Clerk of the House for checking. But even if this final hurdle
is cleared, the petitioners will still have to find their way around a much
more daunting obstacle: the Government’s mandate.

That the Government has a mandate to sell-off 49 percent of
Mighty River Power, Genesis, Meridian and Solid Energy is hotly contested by
the four organisations petitioning for a CIR. Grey Power, The NZ Council of
Trade Unions, The Labour Party and The Greens all deny the legitimacy of the
Government claiming a specific
electoral mandate for its partial privatisation programme. According to the
petitioners’, the voters have (at best) given the National-led Government a general mandate. To claim a specific
mandate, they say, it must first ask the electorate a specific question – hence
the need for a referendum.

This argument would carry more weight if the National
Party’s principal challenger in the 2011 General Election – the Labour Party –
hadn’t itself specified National’s privatisation plans as the best reason for
voting it out of office. “Stop Asset Sales” was the Labour Party’s most coherent
slogan in 2011. That only 27.4 percent of the voters were prepared to back its
flagship policy with their ballots strongly suggests that privatisation was not
the electoral game-changer Labour’s focus-groups had suggested.

The Greens’ were much less willing than Labour to give the
privatisation issue such critical electoral salience. They promised New
Zealanders “a richer future” of which the retention of state assets was
certainly an important (but not an essential) feature. How, then, can the
Greens argue that National’s claim to a specific electoral mandate is
illegitimate when their own policy pitch was so general? If National isn’t
entitled to claim a specific mandate for
asset sales, then, by the same logic, the Greens cannot claim one against them.

The same applies to all the other political parties offering
manifestoes in which, inter alia, the
Government’s plans to partially privatise the State’s energy companies were
opposed. It’s simply not fair to aggregate the Greens 11.6 percent, NZ First’s
6.5 percent, the Maori Party’s 1.4 percent, Mana’s 1.0 and the Conservative
Party’s 2.6 percent of the Party Vote with Labour’s 27.4 percent to claim a
minimum anti-asset sales bloc of 50.5 percent. Opposition to asset sales was
not deemed important enough to preclude a confidence and supply agreement
between National and the Maori Party. Nor would it have been had the
Conservatives managed to cross the 5 percent threshold.

National, of course, has no need to aggregate percentages
for its partial privatisation programme as desperately as its opponents. With
47.3 percent of the Party Vote, the governing party came within an ace of
securing an absolute majority of the votes cast. It would have been an
outstanding tally even under the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, but
coming within 2.8 percent of an outright majority under our Mixed-Member-Proportional
system was close to miraculous. Any political party racking up such a total is
entitled to claim a very strong electoral mandate for all its policies.

National’s claim to a specific mandate for its asset sales
programme is, accordingly, very strong. The policy was announced nearly a year
prior to the election and was subjected to the intense scrutiny of not only the
parliamentary opposition, but also the news media and a broad cross-section of
civil society. The 2011 election was no 1980s or 1990s exercise in duplicity
and fraud: the public understood that a vote for National was a vote to
privatise 49 percent of Solid Energy, Meridian, Genesis and Mighty River Power.
Nearly half of them voted for the Government anyway. If Prime Minister John
Key’s government doesn’t have a mandate to proceed with its privatisation
policy, then the word no longer has any political meaning.

New Zealand’s representative system of government entrusts
the administration of the nation to the political party, or parties, which
alone, or in combination, command a majority in the House of Representatives.
National and its allies played by these rules – and won. Their performance
referendum is scheduled for 2014 – and it’s binding.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 January 2013.

Thursday, 10 January 2013

What Lies Beneath? The most plausible explanation for David Shearer's incoherence as a political leader is that he is masking his true - neoliberal - beliefs. The right-wing character of his political and media support only reinforces this disturbing conclusion.

READ A FEW PARAGRAPHS of David Shearer’s Foreign Affairs article “Outsourcing
War” aloud, then ask yourself this question: “How could the man who currently
leads the New Zealand Labour Party possibly have written that?”

I’d only been reading the article for a few minutes when I
felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise in alarm. I put the journal down and
took a deep breath. Could the article’s author really be the same man I’d
shared a few beers with in a Kingsland pub earlier in the year? Whoever had
written that article possessed a flair for clear and compelling language and a solid
grasp of world history. Most of all, the author of “Outsourcing War” was a
skilled advocate who could, and was, making a strong case for the use of
private armies.

The man I’d been drinking with in that Kingsland pub did not
appear to possess any of those talents. He came across as a typical,
inarticulate Kiwi bloke for whom clear and compelling English would always be a
second language. His grasp of the history of his own party (let alone the wider
world) was weak; his powers of persuasion negligible.

Most of us will readily identify the man in the Kingsland
pub as David Shearer. The questions only begin to pile up when we try to match
New Zealand’s inarticulate and essentially unpersuasive Leader of the
Opposition with the writer who’d successfully tackled what was, in 1998, one of
the most controversial propositions in international relations: That private security
contractors had a better chance of ending low intensity conflicts than the
regular military forces of nation states.

Now it is true that some people can write a great deal more
persuasively than they can speak. The late Bruce Jesson was a poor orator but
an outstanding writer. No matter how badly he mumbled it from the lectern his political
analysis was formidable. What, then, prevents Shearer’s speeches (even his well-rehearsed
and teleprompted address to the Labour Party Conference) achieving the power of
“Outsourcing War”?

What has become of the audacity and passion of the
international aid administrator who penned that extraordinary article? The
person who wrote “Outsourcing War” was a policy innovator; a seeker after
radical solutions; an iconoclast willing to take a sledgehammer to prevailing
orthodoxies. More than this, he was someone who meticulously marshalled his
evidence and then buttressed it with rigorous political and economic analysis.

But very little of this radicalism and even less of the
rigorous analysis has been evident in David Shearer’s parliamentary career.
Indeed, it is hard to recall a more docile back-bencher. As Leader of the
Opposition, however, Shearer has not been able to avoid giving the New Zealand
public at least an introductory glimpse of the sort of politics he admires. Hence
the Esko Aho speech of 15 March 2012, in which he drew New Zealanders attention
to the controversial career of the former Finnish prime minister.

The former Finnish Prime Minister, Esko Aho, largely
untested, came into office in 1991. He was almost immediately faced with a
banking crisis. Jobs were disappearing. Its stock market was tanking. Its
future was hugely doubtful. Aho’s message to the Finnish people was blunt and
honest: They had big problems. No-one else was going to fix them.

For New Zealanders,
meeting big challenges with big solutions is a familiar political meme. And those
of us who lived through it tend to have pretty strong views on what political
journalist, Colin James, described as the “Big Change” of David Lange’s fourth
Labour government. Shearer, however, has maintained a dogged silence on the
economic transformations of the mid-1980s. His admiration of Aho suggests that
this reticence regarding Rogernomics is because, back in the 80s, David Shearer
was a fan of Roger Douglas – not a foe.

His celebration of
the Finnish PMs career is, in this context, highly significant. Aho, like
Douglas, conforms in nearly every respect to what the political scientist,
Geoffrey Debnam, calls a “policy aggressor”.

Policy Aggressor Par Excellance: Roger Douglas realised that the risks of introducing radical change had, by the mid-1980s, become less than those associated with attempting to maintain a failing system.

Well-placed within
the ranks of a disciplined party, the policy aggressor is “prepared to act
decisively and is strategically located to have a significant impact on public
policy.” In Aho’s case the opportunity for an aggressive restructuring of the
Finnish economy came with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union – Finland’s
largest trading partner. At the cost of severe domestic dislocation, and against
the wishes of his own party and its rural support-base, Aho led Finland into
the European Union.

As Shearer,
himself, noted in his speech:

Aho made bold decisions. He was, I need to say, voted out
at the next election. He thought it was more important to make a difference
than to get re-elected. Though our prescription might differ, we could all take
a lesson from that.

According to
Debnam, “only those least likely to be rewarded under normal party conditions
will risk the possibility of party collapse. It is, thus, extremists who are
given a tactical advantage because these are the people who are least likely to
pay the cost of conflict.” This is a pretty accurate description of Douglas who
was only prevented from abandoning the Labour Party by Lange’s promise to make
him Finance Minister.

In his 1990 paper “Adversary Politics in New Zealand: Climate of
Stress and Policy Aggressors” published in The Journal of Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics (Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, March 1990) Debnam sets forth the
preconditions for successful policy aggression.

The process begins
when a lengthy period of economic buoyancy comes to a close in conditions of
significant economic dislocation, initiating what the pioneering political
scientist, Samuel Finer, dubbed a “climate of stress”. Initially, political
parties respond to the developing crisis by applying traditional formulae. But,
as recourse to tried and true methods of restoring economic stability bring
ever-diminishing returns, the electorate increasingly moves towards new and untried
ideologies and/or parties. The resulting political instability only intensifies
the crisis.

“Eventually”,
writes Debnam, “one party will decide that the risks associated with advocating
radical change are less than those in maintaining a failing system. A distinctive
image will be pursued via ideological or visionary appeals. If that is
successful, a new stability may be achieved around a new set of values that
will form the basis of a new consensus.”

Debnam was, of
course, describing the sequence of political events which led up to the
unleashing of “Rogernomics” in the mid-1980s. It is, however, possible to
discern in the 2008-09 collapse of global prosperity amidst multiple and linked
financial crises the initiation of a new climate of stress leading inevitably
to yet another period of radical political, economic and social change.

David Shearer
clearly sees himself as New Zealand’s next big policy aggressor: the
“anti-politician” who considers it more important to make a difference than to
get re-elected. In this respect, at least, the current Labour leader and the
author of “Outsourcing War” evince an unmistakeable congruence of character.

Why then is Shearer so woefully tongue-tied when it comes to
making the necessary “ideological or visionary appeal”. Why don’t his speeches
resonate with the boldness and iconoclasm of “Outsourcing War”?

The only sensible answer is: “Because his ‘solutions’ to the
crisis are merely crude reiterations of the same tried and true methods which,
in the hands of the incumbent government, have already demonstrably failed to
bring the crisis to an end.”

Introducing the efficiencies of the marketplace to the
business of international peace-making undoubtedly had a radical ring to it in
the mid-1990s, but in 2013 it just sounds like more of the same old market
madness. There is, moreover, a world of difference between penning articles for
the International Institute for Strategic Studies and drafting a party
manifesto. Were Shearer to openly declare his intention of becoming a “hands
on” neoliberal policy aggressor, eager to deploy all the powers of the state to
bulldoze new pathways for advancing market power, the Labour Party membership
would rise up in angry revolt. Small wonder, then, that Shearer stumbles and mumbles:
all of his mental energy is devoted to masking rather than revealing his true
intentions.

Ideological mummery is also the key distinguishing feature
of Shearer’s principal backers in the Labour Caucus. Phil Goff, Annette King
and Trevor Mallard all dipped their paper cups into the neoliberal Kool-Aid in
the 80s and none of them have ever publicly recanted (let alone repented) their
supporting roles in Roger Douglas’s Economic Salvation Show. They no longer
defend (at least not publicly) Rogernomics’ legacy, but behind their hands they
dismiss its critics as “paleosocialists” who simply don’t understand how the
world works.

What all of them fail to grasp, however, is that the current
climate of stress is being generated by the failure
of neoliberal ideology (just as the climate of stress of the late-1970s and
early-80s was caused by the failure of Keynesianism). To talk about a neoliberal policy aggressor in 2013 is,
therefore, oxymoronic. The next genuine
policy aggressor will be a politician possessing both the courage and the
imagination to go beyond the maintenance of a discredited orthodoxy – someone
willing to forge a new political, economic and social consensus.

Policy Aggression From The Left: David Cunliffe is seen by many people inside and outside of the Labour Party as the politican best placed to forge a new political, economic and social consensus.

That David Cunliffe is seen by many both inside and outside
the Labour Party as the politician most capable of forging such a consensus largely
explains the extreme viciousness of his recent treatment. That left-wing
policy aggressors are greeted with much more hostility than their right-wing
counterparts is, however, to be expected. The latter’s intention is to shore up
the defences of capitalism, while the former hopes to rescue and empower its
victims. The arbiters of political acceptability in the business community, the
state bureaucracy and the corporate news media will thus move decisively to
forestall even the slightest hint of policy aggression from the Left.

Hence the near unanimous hatred directed at Cunliffe by the
mouthpieces of the neoliberal establishment. Fran O’Sullivan, Jane Clifton and
Matthew Hooton have gone to extraordinary lengths to besmirch Cunliffe’s
character and ridicule his ideas. In a pincer movement with Shearer’s caucus allies
they have attempted to cast the Member for New Lynn as a sly, egomaniacal (if
ultimately inept) Cassius, plotting constantly to bring down Labour’s sensible
Caesar.

At least the motives of these Shearer supporters are clear.
Should the National Party be voted out of office, they are now reasonably
confident that his replacement will not only leave the neoliberal settlement
intact, but that he may also, with Esko Aho’s example set firmly before him, seek
to extend it into the spheres of welfare, health, housing and education. It
will not have escaped their attention that Labour’s “Affordable Housing Plan”
is really just a glorified PPP on behalf of the professional middle-class.

Much harder to fathom is the self-defeating hostility of
Labour MPs who were, until last year’s party conference, considered to be on
the left of the caucus. One might have thought that Phil Twyford, Clare Curran,
Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little would have welcomed the opportunity to travel
in the slip-stream of an ambitious left-wing policy aggressor. After all, the
best chance a left-wing Labour MP has of “making a difference” is surely when
the massive tensions built up under a climate of stress are suddenly released
in a torrent of radical reform.

But the scope for far-reaching change in a government
dominated by Shearer and his neoliberal allies will only be extended to the
Right. That being the case, the prognosis for those who entered Parliament with
honest left-wing intentions is grim. Promotion to Cabinet will depend not only
on making ritual obeisance to Shearer and his clique, but also, following the
tragic precedent of the Rogernomics Era, on abandoning their former social-democratic
ideals. Such self-inflicted injuries to the soul do not heal quickly.

That so many people who consider themselves left-wingers
cannot see where a Shearer-led Labour Party will take New Zealand is baffling. “Outsourcing
War”, alone, should warn them just how far to the right Shearer is content to
position himself when his behaviour is not constrained by the role of Labour’s
leader. His hero-worship of Esko Aho; the quips about beneficiaries and
teachers; his rejection of the Left/Right political divide; the half-hearted
support he offered to the Maritime Union during the Ports of Auckland dispute:
all of these signs point in one direction only. And yet, even the trade unions
continue to back what they obviously (and cynically?) believe to be the winning team. It is only
after the votes have been counted, and David Shearer’s performance-hindering disguises
are triumphantly cast aside, that they will realise, exactly, what they have “won”.

To paraphrase Murray Ball’s superb quip about the backers of
the old FPP electoral system: If you want a good reason for opposing David
Shearer – just take a look at the people supporting him.

Tuesday, 8 January 2013

Permanent Interests: Elected politicians come and go; political parties move backwards and forwards between the Treasury and the Opposition benches; the news media reports, critiques and, very occasionally, exposes the actions of the powerful; but the Permanent Government endures - and its servants are almost never held accountable for their actions.

WILL THE GOVERNMENT Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)
end up in the dock? Is it really possible that senior GCSB officers will be
required to give evidence in the Kim Dotcom Case? The answer is: “probably
not.” The maintenance of state security is arguably the most important function
a government has. It is, therefore, extremely unlikely that anyone will
sanction publicly exposing the blurred lines of authority, legality and
accountability so basic to effective state security.

Though it is nowhere clearly spelt out, it is nevertheless
firmly believed by those who inhabit them that the vital institutions of a
fully-functional modern state: the professional civil service; the Armed Forces
and Police; the Judiciary; senior local government officials; constitute the
“Permanent Government” of the Realm.

Elected politicians come and go; political parties move
backwards and forwards between the Treasury and the Opposition benches; the
news media reports, critiques and, very occasionally, exposes the actions of
the powerful; but the Permanent Government endures.
Over the centuries, it has been forced to concede a number of important roles
to the people’s elected representatives, but obstructing the duties of the Permanent
Government isn’t one of them.

The Kim Dotcom Case is unusual because the conduct of the
Permanent Government is being disrupted by one of its own – the Judiciary.
While there are many examples of politicians frustrated by the actions of a
security apparatus only notionally under their control, it is rare to see the
“spooks” brought to heel by lawyers and judges. So rare, in fact, that it
raises the possibility that Kim Dotcom and his legal team have unleashed some
kind of rogue judicial energy. It has already seriously embarrassed the Prime
Minister and his National Party Government, and now threatens to compromise the
operational reliability of the GCSB.

This is no small matter. New Zealand’s signals intelligence
operation is inextricably bound up with those of the four other Anglo-Saxon
powers: the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia. It is barely conceivable that
the global security reach of these “Five Eyes” might be compromised by some
arcane dispute over the intellectual property rights of the American film and
music industries.

Even more unlikely is the prospect that the FBI – a
principal player in the Dotcom Saga – will meekly submit to the orders of a New
Zealand High Court Judge (or even our Supreme Court). The FBI may include the
entire planet in its jurisdiction, and consider every Western police force to
be an extension of the already very long arm of American law enforcement, but,
when it comes to external scrutiny of its own investigations, the FBI answers
solely to the Attorney-General of the United States.

The most likely outcome of the Dotcom Saga, therefore,is that, somehow, the case will be made to
disappear. Somewhere – both here in New Zealand and (hopefully) in the United
States – a collection of wise old heads will be reviewing the succession of
public relations, political and security disasters which followed the
spectacular arrest of Mr Dotcom in January 2012 and asking how many more
disasters it’s going to take before someone in authority locates the “Off”
switch.

The whole extraordinary story calls to mind a knitted jersey
with a loose thread. The garment which once comfortably covered the naked power
of the Permanent Government has, thanks to Mr Dotcom’s legal team, unravelled
to the point where all manner of formerly hidden things are now on clear
display.

Before the arrest of Mr Dotcom how many New Zealanders were
aware that the GCSB regularly co-operated with the New Zealand Police by
intercepting the cell-phone and e-mail messages of their fellow citizens?

Who among us was aware that it was within the power of our
Prime Minister to sign a document suppressing any and all references to the
GCSB in a New Zealand court of law? When was that extraordinarily undemocratic
and dangerous power conferred upon a politician?

Did anyone suspect that the FBI in Washington had only to
pick up the phone to the New Zealand Commissioner of Police to set in motion a
full-scale armed assault on the property of a man accused of nothing more
sinister than copyright violation?

And, how many Americans would have believed that a handful
of irritated movie moguls and record producers could activate the
enormously complex and expensive machinery of the National Security Agency, the
Department of Homeland Security, the CIA and the FBI for no better purpose than
to scratch a longstanding commercial itch?

Is it really all that likely that this litany of
embarrassing revelations is going to be lengthened by the FBI handing over its
evidence to Mr Dotcom’s lawyers? Or that one of this country’s most
distinguished Queen’s Counsels is going to be unleashed on our top spooks?

I don’t think so.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
8 January 2013.

Friday, 4 January 2013

Sometime A Great Notion: The fate of the Maori Party offers stark confirmation that ethnic identity, alone, offers an insufficient foundation for enduring electoral success.

THE SWING VOTE. With the formation of the Maori Party in 2004 many Maori looked forward towielding a permanent “balance of power” over New Zealand politics. With the Maori birth-rate considerably higher than the Pakeha, the wisdom of enrolling on the Maori Roll was thought to be obvious: a demographic guarantee of many more Maori seats. The Maori Vote, overwhelmingly loyal to the Maori Party, would thus become the decisive factor. Neither National nor Labour would be able to govern without its support. The potential for advancing Maori interests seemed limitless.

Eight years later, the political prospects for Maori have significantly diminished. The Maori Party is a dwindling political force, riven by personal jealousies and ideological confusion, and likely to lose at least two (and quite possibly all) of the three Maori Seats it currently holds in 2014.

The two parties most likely to pick up the seats of Te Tai Hauauru, Tamaki Makaurau and Waiariki: Labour and Mana; are both positioned on the left of the political spectrum, making them ideological non-starters as potential National Party allies. The Maori Party vision of constituting a permanent, ideologically agnostic, component within all future coalition governments has vanished. The Maori Swing Vote, it turns out, was a short-lived illusion. Why?

The answer lies in the misapprehension that ethnic identity alone is an unqualified determinant of political allegiance. The founders of the Maori Party: Tariana Turia, Pita Sharples and Professor Whatarangi Winiata all appeared to believe that simply placing the word “Maori” in front of the word “Party” was enough. Regardless of which social class they belonged to or how much education they’d received, and putting aside all personal experiences and aspirations, the Maori voters’ “natural” cultural affinities would make them unwaveringly loyal Maori Party supporters.

For a few years it looked as though the Maori Party leadership’s assumptions were substantially correct. By 2008 the party held all but two of the Maori Seats and the prospects seemed good for capturing all seven. But the cultural glasses through which the party insisted on observing the Maori electorate had failed to register the brute political facts of their situation.

In the quarter-century since the breakthrough Court of Appeal decision establishing the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi establishes a “partnership” between the Pakeha State and Maori, cultural considerations have increasingly been deployed to mask the embarrassing social gulf which has opened up between the elite wielders of tribally-based, Treaty-settlement-funded corporate power; the narrow layer of well-educated and well-remunerated functionaries who service that power; and the expanding mass of urban and rural Maori who eke out a marginal existence within a New Zealand economy that, increasingly, has little to offer them.

It was the Maori Party’s misfortune to enter into a confidence-and-supply agreement with the National Party just as the Global Financial Crisis was hurling tens-of-thousands of young Maori into joblessness and under-employment. Foolishly, Mrs Turia and Dr Sharples had allowed the overwhelmingly working-class Maori electorate’s eighty-year association with Labour and the New Zealand Left to slip their minds. Of the five Maori Party MPs, only Hone Harawira seemed to appreciate the tremendous damage their association with National was inflicting on the notion of permanent Maori participation in government.

The result was the Mana Party, whose pursuit of the bi-cultural ideals of the 1970s is predicated on first meeting the material needs of Maori and Pakeha working-class New Zealanders. Only when the marginalised, exploited and excluded of both communities have ready access to good jobs, warm and dry homes, and well-resourced hospitals and schools will Mana’s decolonising policies attract the mass support necessary for their success.

The Maori Party’s ambition of exercising a permanent swing vote over New Zealand politics was as short-sighted as it was undemocratic. Throughout human history the universal cry for justice has always attracted more followers than the mystical whisperings of blood and soil. In the end, it isn’t our ethnic origins that determine our electoral choices – it’s our all-too-material interests.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 January 2013.

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

"Lazarus, Come Forth!" In politics it is possible to be killed many times. Coming back from the dead is, therefore, somewhat more common than one might expect. Having entombed intra-party democracy along with his principal rival, the present leader of the Labour Party should not be surprised if some of his colleagues are pondering the Lazarus Option.

“POLITICS IS ALMOST as exciting as war, and
quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many
times.” This pithy Churchillian aphorism should be framed and prominently
displayed in every politician’s office. It wouldn’t hurt if one or two
political journalists did the same. We might then, perhaps, read fewer
political obituaries of Members of Parliament who, having suffered a temporary
set-back, are declared officially, politically dead.

Churchill himself suffered this fate – many
times. So, too, did Australia’s John Howard and our very own Winston Peters. In
every case these politicians demonstrated a Lazarus-like talent for emerging
very much alive from their political tombs.

This ability to be “killed” many times is
probably the most important – yet underrated – aspect of democratic politics.
The chances of the chief minister of an absolute monarch or the consigliere of
a Mafia boss bouncing back after making a serious mistake were slim. Thomas
Cromwell oversold Anne of Cleves to Henry VIII and lost his head. Those who
gave Lucky Luciano “a bum steer” ended up sleeping with the fishes.

Journalistic metaphors about political
executions and assassinations notwithstanding, political leaders operating in
democratic societies do not really enjoy the luxury of “killing” their
opponents once and for all. They can demote them, even exile them to the
back-benches but, generally speaking, that’s about the worst they can do.

Taking the next step: expelling one’s
opponent from the parliamentary caucus, or even from the party itself; is
fraught with much more political danger. The expelled politician may no longer
be a member of caucus, but he remains a Member of Parliament – a position from
which he can inflict considerable political damage upon his persecutors. And if
the expelled politician enjoys widespread support throughout the party organisation, expulsion carries the additional risk of being countermanded by the rank-and-file.
Only a very brave, or very foolish, party leader would risk such humiliation.

In 2010 Phil Goff and his parliamentary
colleagues felt sufficiently confident that the errant MP for Te Atatu, Chris
Carter, having exhausted the patience of both the Labour Caucus and the wider
party organisation, could be expelled from both with impunity. David Shearer, on the other
hand, had to be much more circumspect when dealing with his rival, David
Cunliffe. In the absence of even the slightest evidence of wrongdoing, any
attempt to expel Mr Cunliffe from the Caucus would have been staunchly
resisted. Demanding his further expulsion from the party would almost certainly
have provoked a rank-and-file revolt – with potentially disastrous results.

The wounds inflicted upon Mr Cunliffe by Mr
Shearer and his allies are, therefore, readily survivable. The Parliamentary
Press Gallery – so easily stampeded by Mr Shearer’s backers at the Labour Party
Conference in November – are slowly and shame-facedly backing away from their
earlier, supremely confident, assertions of an imminent Cunliffe-led leadership
coup. But, if there was no “plot” to unseat Mr Shearer, then for what “crime” –
exactly – was Mr Cunliffe demoted? The answer appears to be: “For refusing to
rule out the possibility of a leadership challenge at some point in the
future.”

Mr Shearer confirmed this at the media
conference announcing the reallocation of Mr Cunliffe’s shadow portfolios and
his demotion to the back-benches. His colleague’s “repeated failure
to quell speculation about the leadership,” said Mr Shearer, “means that I no
longer have confidence in him. He has lost my trust.”

It is worth unpacking this statement because it betrays an
attitude to the rights and responsibilities of political leadership which is
quite at odds with New Zealand’s democratic traditions.

Mr Shearer seems to believe that having once been elected to
the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party he is entitled to hold that
position until he decides to
relinquish it. In other words, Labour’s new constitutional procedures for
confirming or changing the parliamentary leadership must now be set aside. Mr
Shearer has signalled that any caucus member who even thinks (let alone
suggests) that someone else might do a better job of leading the Opposition
will be publicly disparaged and demoted.

Such authoritarian notions should be anathema to all
political parties – especially social-democratic ones. Labour parties should be
proud republics in which, as Napoleon quipped: “Every French soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his
knapsack”. Places where those who demonstrate political courage and
resourcefulness have every right to expect rapid political promotion.

The attitudes evinced by Mr Shearer and his backers have no place in such
a democratic political organisation. They belong in princes’ courts: spawning
courtiers not comrades; factionalism not solidarity.

Can a majority of Labour’s caucus honestly attest that this is the sort
of party they entered Parliament to serve? Shouldn’t they be asking themselves
whether, under a leader who has effectively entombed intra-party democracy, it might be
time to consider the Lazarus Option?

This essay was originally
published in The
Press of Tuesday, 1 January 2013.